Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  A few minutes later, Steve, looking glum, came home and made his way to the back bedroom. Mary caught his eyes, and pointed to the bouquet.

  “Oh, look,” she said, “Tina brought us flowers.” She tried to smile.

  Steve said nothing and left the room.

  This is pretty intense, Tina thought.

  When it was time to leave, Tina hugged Mary once more. The shattered woman told her neighbor that she thought everything would work out. She thought things could be resolved within the family. The family would be moving after the school year—a school year that Mary intended to finish at Shorewood.

  “I did something very wrong,” she said. “I made a very bad mistake.”

  When Tina got home she told her Boeing worker husband, Lee, what was going on and Lee got on the phone immediately to call David Gehrke, a lawyer, neighbor, and a buddy since high school. It was a rough week all around for those with ties to the little pod of houses in that Normandy Park neighborhood. Ellen Douglas's brother—and one of David's closest friends—had died in a tragic motorcycle accident just as the investigation into Mary Kay Letourneau began.

  Married to a schoolteacher, David Gehrke was by his own admission a late bloomer. At almost fifty, he was the father of two small boys, with a “busy enough” law practice in Seattle. He could be doing better, but he had no real complaints. He was a sensitive man with eyes that welled with tears when emotional subjects were broached. People who knew that side of him joked that he was the “first lawyer known to have a heart.” He wore a bracelet with the initials WWJD—What Would Jesus Do. David and his family lived in a house above Pacific Highway in Des Moines that was only a stopping spot until they could build a dream home on property in the Normandy Park neighborhood where the Douglases, Bernsteins, and Letourneaus resided.

  “It's Mary,” Lee said on the phone that day.

  David instantly knew about whom and what Lee was referring. He listened while his friend filled in some blanks, saying that Mary was freaking out, worried about the media, worried about what she was going to do.

  Poor Mary, David thought. How terrible to be accused of something you didn't do.

  David knew the Letourneaus only casually. He knew Mary Kay better than Steve, whom he thought was a commercial fisherman.

  “He was just never around,” he said later.

  With people coming in for the wake for Ellen Douglas's brother on Saturday, it wasn't the most convenient time to arrange a meeting. Mary Kay and David talked briefly later that night and agreed to talk in-depth at the Gehrkes' later that weekend. When Sunday came, the pair sat for three hours at the dining room table overlooking a backyard with a swing set and littered with soccer balls and other boy stuff. Bagels from the morning sat on a plate. Mary Kay sipped tea, told her story, and wondered about her options.

  Knowing Mary as he did, at first the lawyer assumed that the charges were unfounded. Mary set him straight.

  “It's all true,” she said. “We are in love.” She went on to describe the boy in “glowing” terms. He was a great artist and a sensitive soul. He was the love of her life. Mary said she and Vili walked with the same rhythm and saw the wonders of life through the same eyes.

  That complicated matters. Big-time. David told her that the law didn't recognize the possibility of love between a thirteen-year-old and a grown woman. In fact, Washington State had recently drawn a hard line and changed the statutory rape law—consensual sex between an adult and a child. It was now called “rape of a child.”

  The options included denying the charges and fighting it out in court. If she pleaded not guilty, David said she could suggest that the boy had been the aggressor, or maybe it was all some teenage fantasy that went too far. Maybe the sex never really happened. Mary Kay saw that scenario as ridiculous. Almost laughable. She didn't think it would work. “I'm carrying his baby,” she said.

  Scratch that.

  Another option was pleading guilty and seeking treatment in lieu of any jail or prison time. From what he knew of her, David considered Mary a perfect candidate for treatment. She was a first-time offender. There had been no other victims. She was highly regarded by the community. She wasn't some pervert. The only hitch was that by seeking treatment she'd have to admit she had a problem. She'd have to register as a deviant, a sex offender. The program that David Gehrke considered her ticket out of serious prison time was the result of Washington's Special Sex Offenders Sentencing Act or SSOSA. The 1984 law allowed for supervised outpatient treatment for sex offenders with no other felony convictions. In reality, it was a brutal regimen of counseling, drugs, behavior modification, and constant supervision. Some sex offenders who'd tried it said they preferred prison—or castration. Female sex offenders were so rare that Washington didn't have a program in place at the women's prison.

  The choice was not pretty.

  Mary Kay wasn't in tears that afternoon, though she might have been if she fully understood the restrictions that David Gehrke said would come with a SSOSA program. She left the meeting seemingly upbeat. Somehow it would work out. She didn't even think it was a crime, and maybe if that was understood by others things would be all right.

  “I didn't think two people being in love could be wrong,” she said later. “I knew that as a teacher it was a big no-no falling in love with a student; a shame on the profession. And I'd have to resign. But a crime? No.”

  David Gehrke had the case of his career and he probably didn't know it. Not long after he talked to Mary Kay, he enlisted his friend Robert Huff, a struggling lawyer ten years younger, to help out with the case. Robert Huff was one of those men pushing forty who appeared to favor the Miami Vice stubble look of the early eighties. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, with chic glasses and a decent wardrobe. He also had a car about to be repossessed and a stack of complaints at the Washington Bar Association, mostly from disgruntled clients complaining that he didn't answer phone calls or letters.

  Next to Bob Huff, David Gehrke, with his Jesus bracelet, soccer kids, and office in Seattle's landmark Smith Tower, seemed as rock solid as they come. David provided the heart of the case, the guy the public would come to know. As Vili and Soona Fualaau's lawyer and Mary Letourneau's “media representative,” Robert Huff was the guy supposedly pulling the strings.

  The two were quite a pair. Whether tipping back Lemon Drops at a bar, partying at a Jimmy Buffet concert, or plopping down on a nude beach and ogling the women like they were a couple of schoolboys, the two were best buddies. It wasn't that hard to figure out the symbiotic nature of the relationship. On the surface David provided respectability and helped Bob out when he got into trouble. And Bob? He provided the fun.

  And Mary Kay Letourneau put her future in their hands.

  “I didn't really 'hire' him,” Mary Kay said later when people asked how she ended up with David Gehrke over a lawyer with more experience in sex cases. “He just came to me to offer help. I didn't even know for sure that I needed an attorney at that time. It just happened that I got David.”

  Over the course of the spring, summer, and into the fall, Mary Kay Letourneau would be in and out of court, motions filed, pleas negotiated. Everything about the case would be complicated. She was pregnant. She would be nursing. She needed evaluations. Drug therapy wasn't possible because of her unborn baby. Delay after delay after delay. There was also the turmoil of her husband and their broken marriage. Strangely, Steve didn't move out after Mary was arrested in February. He stayed put.

  Throughout it all, there would be David Gehrke and Robert Huff and the case of their careers. And, despite the sometimes surreal worldwide interest that would follow that more seasoned media players might find difficult, David and Bob would later insist that they did their best.

  “This Mary thing had so many extreme emotions,” Bob Huff explained later. “It was like a whirlpool or a flushing toilet, depending on your visual preference. We were going crazy. I started calling it the Letourneau Triangle. The Letourneau Triangle
is a place where normal laws of physics and human dealings do not apply.”

  * * *

  Among those who knew her, there was no shortage of concern for Mary Kay Letourneau when the news first broke. Though contending with the sudden loss of her beloved older brother, Ellen Douglas was one of those who tried to get in touch with her neighbor, friend, and fellow teacher. She left a message on the Letourneaus' answering machine.

  “Whatever happens,” she said, “take care of yourself. Eat right. If you can't get out and get groceries, let us know. You can count on us.”

  And across Seattle almost immediately everyone weighed in with an opinion. She was Anne Bancroft's boy-eater Mrs. Robinson of The Graduate and Jennifer O'Neill's lonely wife in The Summer of '42 all rolled into one. She was a schoolboy's dream; a parent's nightmare. She'd stolen a boy's youth. She'd made him a man.

  Chapter 39

  ONE WOULD HAVE thought that an explosion had taken place in Mrs. Letourneau's Shorewood classroom the morning after she had been led away by King County Police Detective Pat Maley. But of course it hadn't. The classroom merely looked the way it always did. The only thing missing was the pretty, but frazzled, presence of the schoolteacher.

  A bulletin board presentation was peeling from its mounting, the words “The American Dream” curling from the wall and falling to the floor. The irony of the statement was not lost on the teachers who pitched in during the aftermath. One said later that she'd have killed to have a picture of the pathetic scene. All the kids in the class had signed a petition on the board confirming their beliefs in the freedoms of the United States.

  “After all,” they concluded, “we are da bomb.”

  A handful of shell-shocked teachers toiled for hours picking up the piles and digging through the debris that seemed a metaphor for the woman who had occupied the room the day before. Papers more than a year old were heaped next to her chair. Junk was everywhere; bulky class projects formed a miniature mountain range around the perimeter of the classroom. Several paper cutters of varying sizes were unearthed from blankets of construction paper. The finding of the cutters was of particular interest. The guillotine-like devices were not allowed in any classrooms since a boy had clipped off the tip of a finger.

  “Guess whose class it happened in?” asked a teacher later with more than a touch of sarcasm.

  In nearly every child's desk, it seemed to one who had been there, was an X-Acto knife. Again, a direct violation of school policy.

  Said one later: “When I see the pictures they show of Miss Perfect's little room, I think… ” Her words trailed off into a sigh.

  The father of one of the students filled in for a few days until a more permanent substitute could be hired. Visitors to the classroom during those subsequent days felt sorry for the man and the others who had helped out during that tumultuous time. Not only was the place a mess and the kids crying, but there was no indication of what had gone on as far as actual curriculum was concerned.

  At first, word came down not to change the room one bit. Mary Letourneau was only accused of something. She was on administrative leave with pay while the legal system made a determination about her fate. Who was to say that she wouldn't be exonerated and allowed to return?

  After a while, the personnel director instructed a teacher to “change everything. She didn't want a shred left of Mary Letourneau.”

  Though many tried to comply with the substitute's call for order, a few students made it exceedingly difficult. And for good reason. They were used to having control of the classroom to such a degree that Mrs. Letourneau was more a peer than a leader. Word got back to other teachers about the difficult time the sub was experiencing. The students were up in arms.

  “We only do that once a week! We're not going to do that!”

  The woman on the front lines scurried from teacher to teacher seeking input about the sixth-grade curriculum that had been ignored much of the year. She had to get the students of room 39 focused on their schoolwork and get them to the end of the year.

  Mary Letourneau was not coming back. The sub wasn't the enemy and they weren't holding down the fort until the return of their favorite teacher.

  Recess dance parties were over and kids were told to get outside and play like the rest of the sixth-graders. It might have been what they “were used to” but it was not going to fly any longer. Homework was doled out and report cards were actually drawn up on time, a first for the year according to a teacher at Shorewood. Other kids looked into the classroom with smiles as big as a goalpost because they knew the party was over. Mrs. Letourneau's kids had to work as hard as they did.

  It was about time.

  And though it wasn't easy, the children began to accept the substitute. One boy told her that he knew that Mary and Vili had been “dating.” Other kids in the class knew, too.

  Some students needed reassurance and consideration and so did their parents. It was a thankless task, juggling emotions, the law, and the loyalty the students felt for Mary Letourneau, but other teachers could see the woman who stepped into room 39 was capable of handling the heavy challenge.

  Teachers shook their heads and even laughed when the substitute told them that her students wanted her to dress more like Mary.

  “You'd look really cute in a short skirt and a big sweatshirt, tennis shoes, and maybe some bright pink lipstick!” they'd said.

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said.

  In time, devotion to the disgraced and absent teacher eroded.

  “The boys were the first to start calling her names,” one teacher remembered.

  * * *

  The staff lounge at Shorewood Elementary was not only a retreat from the somber faces that roamed the hallways; it was also a place where they could talk about what they had heard about Mary. All didn't talk openly. Some were closer' to Mary and felt their allegiance to her eroding. They wanted so much for her to get help for her sickness, be cured, hospitalized. Whatever it took to get her better, preferably far from Shorewood. Those who were less invested in a relationship knew when to back off and keep quiet. As public as it all was, for many at the school it was a personal, emotionally charged issue.

  Pieces of the puzzle came rapidly together and with each new bit of information came the understanding that whatever had been going on between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau had gone on under everyone's noses.

  When the teachers learned of the marina incident, the date reminded one of the group of the last day of school in June 1996. That night the Shorewood graduating sixth-graders convened with friends, parents, and other students to celebrate the end of the school year. As had been the case for several years, the event was held at a local swim club. One teacher who was also a Shorewood parent remembered something about Mary.

  “One of the parents brought a karaoke machine and Vili was there, he was the star, singing. This one girl in particular was hanging all over him… and probably ten minutes before the party is set to end, in runs Mary bouncing around and looking and looking. And I remember her looking and she saw Vili and this girl singing—and she was just so giddy.”

  Here I am!

  “That was the night of the marina incident,” the teacher recalled.

  Another teacher recalled a sixth-grade field trip in which the bus had been kept waiting because Mary and Vili and another boy had lagged behind before showing up, skipping merrily along, arm in arm. A teacher told her that it was “not appropriate behavior.”

  And a teacher remarked about the time Mary Kay was seen “slow-dancing with Vili” during recess. The teacher told Mary Kay to knock it off.

  “It didn't look right,” the teacher said.

  The investigation by the police and a worried school district continued in the days after Mary Kay Letourneau's arrest in the school parking lot. Information came slowly. Vili's buddies had known about the sexual relationship since the summer before seventh grade. One boy told police investigators how Mary Kay had picked Vili up one night in
her van to have sex near some apartments in White Center. Another time, the kid said, Mary Kay got Vili from the Boys and Girls Club for sex.

  “They came back in around ten minutes,” the kid said.

  Chapter 40

  AFTER MARY LETOURNEAU was gone, Shorewood teachers who knew her were left with snapshots of memory they couldn't reconcile with all the recollections percolating in the staff room. One young teacher who knew Mary only casually would never forget her impression of the teacher just the day before the Highline school superintendent came to break the news. She hadn't seen Mary much in the previous weeks—Mary hadn't been in the staff room.

  “I remember looking at her and thinking how beautiful she looked. She looked so happy. She was pregnant; she was radiant. I just remember thinking, 'Wow, that's great.'”

  The day after the news came was intensely disconcerting for the young teacher. The allegations were preposterous.

  “She couldn't have done anything,” she said to another. “How could someone who knew she was in so much trouble be so serene?”

  “Well, you never know,” the other offered.

  Wrong, she thought.

  Almost two years later, tears would come to her eyes as she recalled the memory.

  “To find out that she had all this in her head and pretended to be so fine. That's stmck me ever since.”

  What was she thinking? How was she able to cover such a devastating reality?

  Another teacher who shared lunch duty with Mary Kay the day of her arrest was also stuck by the deception, the denial—whatever it was. While they were helping out with the students, Mary Kay told the teacher how excited she and Steve were about welcoming their fifth child to their family in the spring.

  “She said they had both come from large families and had wanted a fifth child. Other people told them they should stop at four.”

  It bothered teachers at Shorewood when the media proclaimed knowledge of a foot-long waiting list for parents who wanted to get their children into Mrs. Letourneau's class, but could not be accommodated. There was no waiting list.